Acting Like a Writer

Puntitas has had quite the writerly week. It began last Friday with an acceptance, which felt amazingly good. It involved submitting a digital photograph and an audio or video recording of the two poems. Puntitas doesn’t like having her picture taken, so she asked a friend for a copy of a photograph that was taken last summer on a weekend trip to the coast.

Then she contended with the recording process. Not adept with Goldwave, which is neither generally difficult nor stupid-friendly enough for Puntitas’ limited skill set, she decided to try her mp3 player-recorder. That worked surprisingly well, even the file conversion process.

The hard part was actually reading the poems so that they sounded out loud the way they do in her head. Though she practiced for half an hour, her trial readings sounded like an insomniac counting sheep. She next opted for memorizing the text so that she could pretend to act them out on stage. Though the poems were short, memorization took a long time, and so did working on the delivery. When Puntitas felt ready, she paced up and down the hall, recorder in hand, and eight or nine restarts later per poem, she was ready to move the files to her desktop. If Puntitas were more ambitious, she would have tried again to get a better delivery, but having spent the entire day on less than three minutes of simple voice performance, she had concluded that she was definitely done.

The next writerly activity was revision. While she was preparing for her recording, she noticed a poem had one of those shrieking minor problems that should have been corrected within days of its composition. Halfway through the piece, all the plurals mysteriously turned singular. Why has Puntitas never noticed this in the ten years she’s tinkered with the damn thing? Once that was corrected, Puntitas went back to other things that needed work, like the Miltonian sonnet, completely reworking the sestet, using only a line and a half from the original. She made noticeable changes to three other poems; she reshaped some rough drafts to get them closer to intermediate drafts; and she read two others to get a sense of how much revision they would need after all.

The third writerly event of the week was experimentation. Puntitas read a call for submission for an anthology of hint fiction, the ultimate in short shorts that evokes a scene and situation, but includes enough ambiguity to suggest several interpretations. Since Puntitas’ fiction tends to run longer than most journals read, she didn’t seriously consider visiting the web page for guidelines, but then again, she was bored and uninterested in getting back to work, So she clicked anyway. The entries had to be twenty-five words or less. The examples sounded like compressed poetry fragments, Some more poem-stanza and others more cliff-hanger in tone. Puntitas wrote two, one based on a poem draft and the other based on a completely new idea. While both sound incomplete as poems, they do sound like good drafts, and the experience of compression has really been a learning opportunity in that it makes the writer conscious of what is most important and how that concept is most succinctly and concretely conveyed. Puntitas will probably try to flesh the pieces out to make them into short poems.

Finally, Puntitas sent out a couple of submissions. There are two or possibly three more she wants to mail out by Tuesday. She’s trying to be more organized in that she’s collecting e-copies of the submissions in one email folder and emailing herself the postal submissions to store in the same place. Her wake up call came when she visited one journal’s submission manager, remembering that she’d submited once, but discovering that she’d submitted twice, each batch including two poems.

Puntitas reads _Scandalous Deception_ by R. Rogers, _Milagro en los Andes_ by N. Parrado, and _The Knitting Goddess_ by D. Bergman.

Back to the Mail

Puntitas is in the throes of much writerliness and knitting. About the latter, she’s making a long and flowy cape, probably the longest and flowiest of her collection. Currently rows are about 650 stitches long. By the time she finishes, they’ll be at a thousand.

About the former, she has sent out five more batches of poems. She has reread the individual pieces before printing or emailing. In half the cases, she has been satisfied with the poem and sent it out as is. In the rest, she has revised, cutting or reworking an awkward line or word in some instances, moving or adding whole stanzas in others. Rather than frustrating her as it has previously, the process has felt reassuring, proof that she can read her work objectively and that she does generally like it.

When she reread her Miltonian sonnet, the one that responds to “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” she decided it needed much work. The images she had been most concerned about were the most effective; the ones she’s been comfortable with needed the most work. The conceit in the first two stanzas wasn’t clear enough on a literal level, so she changed it to one that had seemed trite when she was drafting, but now efficient (more expected by the reader) and apt (appropriately descriptive). Initially, she thought that going with the familiar meant falling into cliché, but now she thinks that clichés can be revived with original details and that they can shortcut readers to a frame of mind that is the first step to the ending of the poem, which will hopefully not be cliché.

Now the greatest amount of work is needed in the sestet. Puntitas read both Milton’s sonnet and the passage in Matthew that it eludes to many times while writing her response, and for other readers to make sense of Puntitas’ sonnet, they would need to read both many times as well. Without that background, the octet and the sestet don’t make sense together and her comeback to his last line sounds like a digression. All in all, she can keep half the lines in the last section, but will probably need to do a lot of reshaping.

Oh, and another rejection arrived last week, an optimistic form letter from the North American Review. . Puntitas thought she had exhausted her supply of pending rejections from the previous mailing.

Puntitas reads _The Friendly Young Ladies_ by M. Renault.

The Poetry Reading

The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.

After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.

Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.

Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.

After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

In the Details

When is a piece of writing ever done? That’s the question I struggle with most. I think things are done. Then I read them again months or years later, and I realize they’re not. That more than anything keeps me from feeling like an accomplished writer.

Real writers know. Real writers read their work years later, say, “I would write that better now,” but feel satisfied that the poem or story was written well. I write, and when I read the piece again from a stranger’s distance, I think, “This is the work of an amateur.”

Most often, the devil for me is in the details. Without much trouble, I catch gaps in the logic or the plot, and I catch inconsistencies in images or characters,. Where I’m likely to find problems is in the nuance suggested by all the little details: the gesture a character makes at a key point in the dialog, the shape or size of an object on a table, the length and rhythm of a paragraph or line. Sometimes they contradict me. Sometimes they distract. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do too much. The frustration is that, when they’re working, I know God is in the details.

Last Sunday, I reread my two sonnets and another one of the poems I’ve been working on relatively recently. Over all, I like the sonnets. They’re clear, detailed, and easy to read. The endings, which had been my great concern, hit the right notes in both what they say and how they leave the reader feeling. On the Shakespearean sonnet, I unchanged most of what I’d changed the last time I worked on it. That realization was what ultimately decided me to call the poem finished.

When I read the Miltonian sonnet, I discovered it read much better than I expected. I spent most of my energy changing details in the octave to develop the image in the title. The bony whore seems more out of place than ever, but she was too helpful in the writing and is too precise about the nature of the wait for me to let go of her yet, so I may send the poem out a few times before I can get up the nerve to replace her with some other story.

The third poem is one I’ve never mentioned here. I like it for lots of different reasons. It was well received in workshop. It’s got a solid build. It’s a tribute to the power of art. It made me feel close to the friend who inspired it. I’ve sent it out a few times, but it hasn’t been picked up. Each time I read it, I notice some of the details “aren’t there yet,” a wonderful expression I heard to describe a lack of readiness to understand or articulate, and though more of the details are contributing to the wholeness of the poem now, many of them still are not. How long will I have to wait? How long?

When I consider How My Light Is Spent (Some more)

Ah, the post partal effluvia has receded. I read my Miltonian sonnet last night, and it has ceased to be the quintessential Miltonian sonnet, the one he would have written if his sensibilities were mine.

Fortunately, I still like it. I revised, of course, more editing than real revision, and I haven’t changed my mind about sending it out soon.

Most of the changes involved adding more periods. The poem was basically two long sentences, and while grammatical and perfectly clear, they made the whole thing overly dense. I broke it up, not easy when meter and rhyme need to be taken into account. The effect is to make the tone more anxious, angrier. That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but I think it works, so I’ll probably leave it alone.

The most significant changes, the ones that were real revisions, happened in the last line. It sounded very cryptic to me sans post partal effluvia, so I spent over an hour writing and rewriting it. Now its sense is clearer, but I’m not sure that it will have any meaning to the general reader.

What does that mean?

I made the mistake of Googling the sonnet. The blog entries I read discuss it in very conventional terms: the speaker wonders if he will be judged by God for not exercising his gifts to the fullest, then realizes (1) that God, the giver of all gifts, doesn’t need humans to do His work for Him and (2) that standing and waiting is work enough. Of course, the bloggers emphasize the tragedy of blindness, which is what prompts the speaker’s musings in the first place.

For the general reader, a sighted reader, that tragedy is one of the assumptions of the poem. For the speaker, blindness is a fact, and it’s a hardship, but its tragedy is that it may be a possible obstacle to salvation. My own reading of the situation, not the poem, is that what impedes the speaker from exercising his gifts is not his blindness, but the small mindedness of others, who, in not recognizing that he can be an instrument of God as well as they, fail to exercise the gift/responsibility of loving their neighbors as themselves. Saying all of this in a few short lines is hard. It’s even harder when the reader is unwilling to rethink the nature of the tragedy and his or her roll in it.

Another thing I noticed about my response to Milton’s sonnet is that one of the images (the bony whore) that was key during the writing seems to be unimportant now. It isn’t altogether irrelevant. It suggests by analogy. But what I’ll have to decide is whether that analogy or another will work best.

I should reread other poems now that I’m sitting in the arid glare of reality.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (continued)

My Miltonian sonnet has a title now, and excerpt from the original. At the moment, I think it’s hot stuff, but right now I have no judgment.

I’m bathing in the post partal effluvia of my own brilliance. Not arrogance: the cherished delusion that evaporates all too quickly. Why is it that whatever we write is perfect for about a month and only that all too fleeting month? After that, public bathroom graffiti is a goal to strive for. Alas, alack.

I read the sonnet again two days ago. I did a little tinkering, substituting words that don’t conjure images with those that do (harried whore to bony whore) and snipping a few function words (mostly articles) to help the images roll into one another. I spent a while on the last line, which sounded about as meaningful as the cryptic writing on the stall.

When I reread the poem just now, I’d forgotten about the last line. The changes seem to work though the image is different from what I had been going for. For my original idea to make sense, the reader would have to know what a talent is (a unit of measure in money) in order to get a really bad pun that isn’t particularly clever even at the most superficial level. The line as it actually reads, however, draws on the image of the houses like tombs and does something more complex.

Were I not floating in my own effluvia, I could never admit that poems really do write themselves. It’s a matter of getting the tool at the word processor to let them.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Tonight I wrote a poem: a whole poem from beginning to end. I haven’t done that since graduate school. It took about two and a half hours to write.

Mostly it wrote itself, not quite dictation. I had to stop to look up the parable of the talents, and I had to stop to reread one of Milton’s sonnets, and I almost shut down during the sestet, but the write image came into my head (empty houses like tombs),,. With that, I was able to compress it from a line in order to push on to the end, where I now had more syllable space for the clincher, another image (digging in a field).

Yes, it’s another sonnet (Miltonian no less). It’s a response to Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” which I’ve always wanted to rail against. In many ways, his final image is perfect: servants spend a lot of time standing and waiting, and having done a lot of that myself, there’s something to be said for the strength required to do it. But there’s little comfort in accepting the fate of living on perpetual hold until one is acknowledged to be human.

I think my response is clear, but this may be one of those situations where point of view gets in the reader’s way. I can’t really explain what I mean without going into detail about the poem, and I’m not ready to do that. The only thing I can really say is that we all have biases, some so deep we don’t know we have them. When we encounter an idea that goes against one of these biases, our response is incomprehension or anticlimax. Knowing how to write for that biased reader is really difficult because the risks are obscurity and dogma. For now, I want the poem to sit for a week or two so I can read it fresh.

The writing was amazingly fast, and I’m excited. It feels good, a little weird, a little hard to believe.

It still doesn’t have a title, except maybe “To Milton,” but that’s pretty sucky.